The Walls of Air Page 0,94
up the steps without assistance. His wife was screaming and sobbing with joy. In a way it was touching, Gil thought, shivering in the icy cold of the sunrise. But it must be poor exchange for a pile of ice-crusted bones to some of the spectators.
After the smells of grease and smoke and human frowziness, the ice-water clarity
of the morning was a welcome relief. Mauve clouds piled the lower slopes of the peaks above. Beyond them, the sky was a pale bluish green, the light cool and holy on the tracked brown slush and ice-crusted mud. Gil stood on the steps, her cloak wrapped tightly about her, thinking of the three men on whom she had closed the gates - of the Icefalcon, when the slender protection of the Rune of the Veil had been stolen from him, of Ingold, journeying slap into the biggest Nest of the Dark in the West of the World, hoping to find the Archmage there, and of Rudy -
'Gil?'
Aide was standing at her elbow. Gil breathed a sigh of relief. 'You're just the lady I want to see.' As they walked together out of Gil's watchpost among the sprawling food compounds, Gil hastily outlined last night's conclusions with regard to the meaning of the words 'fortunate place.'
'So the guys are walking straight into that,' she finished, her breath drifting in a white veil against the darkness of the inky trees beyond. 'Bektis will be awake by this time, won't he? Can you ask him if he can get in touch with them? Ingold talked about getting in contact with Lohiro at Quo, so there's got to be a way to do it. I mean, to talk back and forth by crystal. Get him to contact them and tell them not to go any farther until I can talk to them.' She glanced up at the pale brightness of the sky. It was late October, she calculated, but the days were already shortening to the time of the Winter Feast. 'I'll be off duty around sunset.'
'All right.' Aide wrapped her sable cloak more tightly around her and hurried off down the slushy path for the Keep once more, the thick fur rippling in the light. But in less than an hour she was back, stumbling over the slippery mess of the icy trail, holding her thin peasant skirts clear of the mud.
Gil, huddled like an undernourished blackbird at one corner of the compound, left off trying to warm her hands and strode toward the girl. 'What did he say?'
'I'm sorry, Gil,' Aide panted. A flurry of the Keep children ran past them, throwing snowballs and shrieking, on their way to pick up kindling in the woods. A drift of smoke came to them from the wash-pots or the smokehouses, and with it the thunk of an arrow in a practice tree. 'I'm sorry. Bektis says they're there already.'
'What?'
'He says they've reached the walls of air. His spells can't find them within the mazes.'
Gil cursed, comprehensively and imaginatively. 'How long have they been there? Or does that tea-leaf reader know?'
'No - Bektis isn't very careful about things like that. But they've been gone only a little over four weeks, so I'd imagine they've only just reached the Seaward Mountains.'
'Son of a - I've been stupid,' Gil said. 'Blind and stupid. I should have figured out the etymology before this.' She picked up a chunk of snow from the ground and hurled it with vicious strength against the mud-slab side of the nearest shelter.
'So if they've reached the walls of air,' she went on more quietly, 'then by the time they come out, they'll already know anything we have to tell them.'
Chapter 12
'Do you see it?'
'See what?'
Ingold did not reply. He only tucked his mittened hands into his sleeves and watched Rudy with a close, speculative expression, as he watched the younger man when he practised spells of illusion or made the waters of a creek rise or fall. A breeze shook the leaves of the yellowed aspens over their heads, spattering them and the sodden path underfoot with leftover rain.
'You mean the road?' Rudy asked, looking back.
The turning he'd seen - or thought he'd seen - was gone. Only the main road was visible, its hexagonal blocks unevenly worn and faintly silver under their carpet of tawny decay, winding away in silence through the wet cathedral stillness of the woods.
Rudy looked inquiringly at Ingold but saw that he wasn't going to get any help there. He